Best Practices And Tips For Video Optimisation

Catch a prime trend this coming year by optimising video content for your website.

It’s all about making the video content on your website highly accessible and available to searchers. Outlined below are some invaluable data, strategy and analysis guidelines to consider to help build visibility for your video content across the search engines.

1) Make Your Content Relevant And Informative

A good starting point is to make sure that your video clip communicates a clear and useful message. Videos that educate, inform and demonstrate are useful only in as far as their message is relevant to the audience to which they are addressed. Don’t up load flashy videos that have no clear purpose in what they are looking to achieve. Videos should be relevant to your company and the services or products that you produce. One things that’s always useful to do is to highlight the benefits and unique selling points of using your particular service over your competition.

2) Catchy Title

Quite simply, if you want people to click on your videos – give them a catchy title something that stirs the curiosity of the user. It’s also a good idea is to include a relevant key-phrase here relating to your service, product or brand. Use Keyword research Tools – i:e Word-tracker, Yahoo buzz to find out which keywords people are searching for to find your services.

3)Name your video files accurately

Give a name to the video file that relates to the content and content of the page builtaround the video if relevant. Use keyword rich filenames:

i:e November-business-loan.movrather than2736475589-lb.mov

The search engine bots will read the file name and relate those words with the file so be as descriptive as possible.

Use Multiple File Formats for ease of download and to encourage viral networking.

i:e Ipod, IPhone formats

7)Use Video As A Portal To Other Content On Your Site

Once you have uploaded your videos across a network of video hosting sites such as Youtube it’s a good idea to create links back to your website. These backlinks to yor website are a good way to increase traffic on your website as well as increasing your Google Page Rank.

Make Your Videos Short (No more than 3 minutes)

It is much better to have a number of snippets or shorter clips that users can choose to play individually rather than one long clip. Peoples attention span is not long online and it’s good to keep an eye on length. If you break your video down to a number of smaller snippets tag each individually with relevant keywords.

9)Tagging Your Video

Add 4 or 5 keywords of phrases to your video tags that are relevant to your video and your video content. (you may wan to do some keyword research using software like Word tracker into what keywords people are looking for in order to find your service.

10)Imbed Video Options

Allow Users to have the option of embedding their video on their blog etc. this is a key. Part of viral marketing where your video content will become distributed by peoples inclination to show the video to others. Obviously for this to work effectively your video needs to make an impression in the fist place!

11)Provide HTML Transcripts Of Your Videos

Search engines find Html easy to index and it is a good idea to provide on-page copy surrounding your video that the “bots” will then be able to index. Include a key-phrase / keyword rich synopsis or transcript. This will get the attention of the crawlers as well as endearing your brand to V searchers.

12)Create Unique Web Pages For Individual Videos

This may not always be possible but is a good idea if you want to increase the visibility of your content across the Internet. It basically gives you the opportunity to customize the copy and messaging related to your video. It can also help in relating the content of the page to the video of the page which helps the search engine spiders. With this approach be sure to optimize the title tag and meta description tag to speak to the content of the video. Use of H1 and H2 tags are useful in describing and highlighting the video content. Another thing you can do is to build links and Landing Pages for specific Topics or Promotions that then link through to these videos.

13)Watermark And Brand Your Video With Your Logo

You need to make sure that your audience is aware of your brand. Brand awareness is one of those things that may not have a big impact straight away but the more you proliferate your brand the more likely it is that people will recognise you and keep coming back. Also, when viral networking takes hold you want to be able to have your site and brand connected with it.

14)Relevant Anchor Text

Include relevant keywords from your tags in the anchor text of your site and information content displayed across your affiliate network.

15)Allow Users To Rate Your Video

Videos that receive higher rating are generally the types of videos that people will highlight and save. They are also more likely to get passed on creating a viral network.

16) Include Descriptive Metadata.

For those of you that don’t know – metadata is what the search engines use to crawl your website and find on what it is about. You need to include a description of your video content through keyword rich descriptions.

17) Include A Video Site-map

Include a video sitemap on your website that has all the links to your video content.

You may want to include anchor text links on different pages of your website that link to

your relevant videos. Capitalize on Anchor Text Opportunities

Video site maps can be submitted to both video and content engines, they allow you to display your video library and encourage the spiders to index your site more regularly.

18)Video Syndication

Submit your video to RSS and Atom Feeds

19) Include A Call To Action

Follow video with an easy conversion – send to friend- site link

20) Entice your Audience

Build simple and effective lures to attract people to the video content.

21)Consider Paid Search For Niche Markets

Although most people click on the natural listing within the search engine page results, sponsored listings are useful for gaining brand awareness and recognition for niche markets. They are a great way for you to be seen as the first people to supply new markets and trends. The field is wide open so bids on generic video terms is relatively affordable. Eric Papczun of Performics recommends optimizing for generic keywords relating to video as well as content related keywords. Submit to both types of engines – content and Video. Optimize clips for ripe terms to capture both niche market and more generic video search terms.